Politics & Power Quote by Thomas Sowell

Sowell’s line is a neat piece of ideological jiu-jitsu: it grabs a safe, broadly palatable civic virtue (“balanced budgets”) and flips it into a warning label. The target isn’t fiscal discipline as such; it’s the political habit of treating “balance” as an accounting trick rather than a restraint. If you can raise taxes indefinitely, a balanced budget becomes less a hard boundary than a permission slip - a way to launder bigger government through the language of responsibility.

The repetition of “ever rising” does the heavy lifting. It’s not a technical claim about any single tax hike or spending bill; it’s a story about drift. Governments, in this view, have a default setting: programs accrete, constituencies defend them, costs compound, and the tax system stretches to keep up. Balanced-budget rhetoric then becomes a fig leaf for expansion, letting leaders posture as prudent while the baseline ratchets upward.

Context matters: Sowell emerges from the postwar American argument between Keynesian comfort with countercyclical deficits and the conservative fear that temporary measures never stay temporary. His insistence on “reduced spending” signals a preference for structural limits over managerial promises. The subtext is distrust - not just of politicians’ self-control, but of the incentives baked into democracy, where benefits are concentrated and the bill is diffuse.

It works because it reframes the moral question. The debate isn’t “Are we balancing the books?” but “What is the state allowed to grow into?” In that shift, taxation becomes not a tool, but an accelerant.